Looking Up: Spica stands out on spring evenings

Peter BeckerMore Content Now

Friday

May 11, 2018 at 12:01 AMMay 11, 2018 at 9:34 AM

Do you have a favorite star in the night sky? It’s a hard question. They are all so great, each one so appealing. They need not be the most brilliant or colorful. Dim ones are full of wonder as well. Are the faint because they are so extremely distant, or do they shine with less light- or both?Some are double stars; other triple or even quadruple- either by coincidence because they happen to line up close as we see them but are at different distances, or they really are a star family.Other stars vary in output. Variable stars might be pulsating on their own or dim and brighten on a regular schedule because of another star of differing magnitude eclipsing the other as it orbits.Stars come in white, red, orange, yellow, blue and purple. I am determined to see a green one though astronomers claim there aren’t any. Ridiculous. I keep looking!We can’t tell with just our eyes or even our backyard telescopes by just looking in the eyepiece (unless you have one I definitely want to know about), but stars differ remarkably in size, spin, chemical make-up and even shape (the ones that spin quicker are more flattened on the poles).It’s an amazing and beautiful Universe of which we are a part; our Sun is one of anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and an untold, unfathomable number across this Cosmos. Not that "100 billion" is any more fathomable to our everyday experience. Among the brighter stars in the evening springtime sky is Spica.This blue-white star sines at first magnitude (+1.04), the 15th brightest star in Earth’s night sky. Although not nearly as bright as the orange, 0-magnitude star Arcturus (currently high in the east in early evening), Spica stands out with no very bright star nearby. Spica is the brightest star in the large constellation Virgo the Virgin. The star is also called Alpha Virginis. You may see Spica about a third of the way up the sky in the southeast once darkness falls (as seen from the mid-northern United States). You can find Spica by first looking up high in the north at the Big Dipper. Follow the arc of the Dipper’s "handle" in a long curve first to the star Arcturus, and then to Spica. The ancient Egyptians referred to Spica as the "Star of Prosperity" and inspired them to build temples in the star’s honor. The name Spica means "ear of wheat." In old star atlases the constellation of the Virgin is always depicted as holding a sheaf of wheat in her left hand marked by the star Spica. There are, however, numerous ways constellations have been drawn, connecting stars with imagined lines. The brilliant, late children’s author H.A. Rey also wrote a famous constellation book for all ages, "The Stars: A New Way to See Them." He creatively redrew many constellations to better match what they represent. He reconnected the stars of Virgo to look something like a woman, but she appears to be sitting on her bright gem, Spica! Spica is close double star, whose components orbit about each other every four days. The are so close they cannot be resolved as two stars in a telescope, but the binary nature is revealed by spectroscopic studies. Spica is approximately 250 light years away- Spica-shine (as opposed to sunshine) takes that many years to reach our eyes. When you look at Spica (in 2015) you are looking back in time to 1765! New Moon is on May 15.Be sure to see bright planet Venus in the west during twilight, and bright planet Jupiter in the southeast.Keep looking up!— Peter Becker is managing editor at The News Eagle in Hawley, PA. Notes are welcome at news@neagle.com. Please mention in what newspaper or web site you read this column.